Feds have proof Dem IT workers 'hacked our democracy'

These days, the Department of Justice and mainstream media appear almost obsessed with the notion that Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump - but what happens when there's solid evidence that foreign actors, hired by Democrats and working inside the U.S. Capitol, posed as U.S. congressmen and "hacked our democracy"?

Apparently, not much at all.

No outrage. No arrests. No charges.

"You might almost say they hacked our democracy," Fox News' Tucker Carlson said during a Wednesday interview with Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter Luke Rosiak, who has blown open the bizarre scandal centering on Pakistani-born Democratic congressional IT aides who accessed data of lawmakers for whom they didn't work.

"This is the pattern we've seen time and again," Rosiak told Carlson, "where the [Department of Justice] and the FBI have evidence of crimes - particularly in cases involving Democrats and the politically connected - and there's just no charges. And it's stuff that everyone knows if the average joe were to do this stuff, they'd go straight to jail."

WND reported in January that the aides sometimes even logged in as congressmen to cover their tracks. Authorities said there is evidence the members' data may have been aggregated onto one server, which then was physically stolen.

As WND reported, IT staffer Imran Awan, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and their wives Natalia Sova and Hina Alvi, were highly paid IT administrators working for dozens of House Democrats until Capitol Police began probing them in early 2017.

The IT staffers allegedly ran a ghost employee scheme with a take of nearly $6 million over the years. After wiring approximately $300,000 to his native Pakistan in July, Imran Awan was arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport. He was then indicted on four counts of bank fraud in connection with his wire transfer. He was carrying $12,000 in cash on him at the time of his arrest.

There have been no criminal charges related to the House IT breach. The indictments of two of the suspects were only for bank fraud, after prosecutors said the suspects transferred money from the House bank to Pakistan and tried to flee the country.

A House's Office of the Inspector General report summarized the findings of a four-month internal investigation that said the behavior of the aides mirrored a "classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization," the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. Still, neither the Department of Justice nor the FBI has filed charges.

"What does the FBI do?" Rosiak asked. "They put literally a first-year agent on the case. We are talking this is the same pattern of the [Democratic National Committee] hack. We have got potential foreign meddling, but we have a cyber breach. And they put a junior guy on the case. He watches them.

"Basically, the IG report pinpoints this particular server in the House as ground zero of the hack. That server is stolen from underneath the nose of the FBI. And the FBI still doesn't make an arrest. They surveil this guy. They watch him move hundreds of thousands of dollars to Pakistan. They follow his wife to the airport, watch her board the plane and basically wave goodbye. ...

"If you have seen that IG report, you cannot conclude anything other than that these guys infiltrated Congress and made unauthorized access to data," Rosiak said. "It's the kind of thing where, criminal charges, there's no way around it."

The House report found remote sessions on computers of members that remained active for months at a time. A House committee staffer close to the probe told the Daily Caller News Foundation that "the data was always out of [the members'] possession."

"It was a breach. They were using the House Democratic Caucus as their central service warehouse."

The House report said all five of the shared employee system administrators collectively logged onto the Democrat members' system 5,735 times, an average of 27 times per day.

"This is considered unusual since computers in other offices managed by these shared employees were accessed in total less than 60 times," the report said.

Imran Awan spent several months each year in Pakistan and continued accessing the House server remotely when he was abroad.

Awan worked for Wasserman Schultz for 13 years, beginning when she was first elected to Congress in 2004.

In an interview last fall about the case, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, told WND: "The American people deserve to know the truth to this; it is a big deal. It's not just $6 or $7 million, $120,000 worth of equipment here or there. The biggest thing is that the brothers, Awan's wife and friend all had access to the private emails and electronic communications of members of Congress and all their staff."